PageRank Prediction

January 13th, 2007

There are lots of sites offering “PageRank Predictor” tools, which will grant you the benefit of foresight and let you know what your PageRank will be during the next PR export.

Just so there’s no confusion about this: PageRank Predictors do not work. At all.

PageRank is soley based on the number of incoming links and the associated “weight” of these links. Imagine the web only had 100 pages in total and you had links from 99 of these pages. It would be pretty safe to assume that you’d have a really high PageRank, for this example we’ll say the Toolbar gives you 9/10. Now what happens when the web grows to 1,000,000 pages and you still have 99 links? Things aren’t looking so great now are they? The PageRank system need to be upscaled to deal with this growth, so you now have a PR of 3 on the next export. (Sorry).

The web is growing - fast, therefore the PR system is constantly tweaked to cope with this expansion and the only people who know what changes are made are of course, you guessed it - Google. The people who make these PageRank predictors can at very best try and examine the incoming links from other sites, gauge their PR then compare it to yours. Unfortunately, because of the delay between exports their calculations are doomed to failure, even if this initial calculations were accurate. To get an “accurate” calculation they would need to perform the level of crawling as Google and examine the link structure of every single page on the entire Internet to give you an accurate guess.

I haven’t yet found a PageRank predictor website that has invested in millions of pounds of hardware to do this yet. Oddly enough though, all the PageRank predictor sites I can find, have Adsense on… Strange that, isn’t it?